The LSB workgroup is pleased to announce the availability of LSB 5.0 Beta 1.

This beta is intended to test the completeness of our data gathering for this release, and consists of the LSB SDK and the application and distribution checkers. We are releasing these items for the x86 and x86_64 platforms first.

The SDK, Application Checker, and Distribution Checker can be downloaded from the Linux Foundation's FTP site:

The LSB Workgroup is pleased to announce the release of the LSB Software Development Kit (SDK) 4.1.5, and updates to the Application Checker and the 4.1 distribution tests. These updates are now available from the LSB Download page:

The Linux Standard Base (LSB) aims to unify the Linux platform for software developers, and to make it easier for them to deploy and support those applications under more than one Linux distribution. There are several levels at which the tools the LSB provides can do this, from simply identifying distribution dependencies to evaluating compatibility between several popular distributions.

This section will provide documentation on what to do after you have reached your goal. How do you obtain certification if you've achieved it? What do you do if your app is multi-distro compliant? This section will provide those answers.

Porting your application to multiple distributions is a task that conjures up images of large engineering and support costs, which detract from the real value of the Linux platform. It is the primary goal of the LDN to provide the skills and the tools to vastly reduce those costs by emphasizing portability techniques for cross-distro application development, or full LSB certification.

More and more ISVs and developers of existing applications are facing the choice of how to go about porting their application to Linux. Should they choose to port to just one Linux distribution or many? Is LSB certification right for their app?

Note: The following information is out of date, and is preserved here for posterity. Developers interested in testing LSB compliance should use at least two LSB-compliant operating systems in their testing instead.

Once the decision is made to build a new application that is LSB compliant, what needs to be done next? There is some setup involved to develop an application to the LSB. The steps involved in setting up are:

In this section, builders of new applications can learn how easy it is to get their application ready for LSB certification, using the right tools to build and to test their application.

The LSB Software Development Kit (SDK) enables developers to validate the binaries and RPM packages to ensure LSB compliance and monitor the API usage by the application while the build is taking place so that conformance is assured.

Having learned what the Linux Application Checker ("AppChecker") can do, it's now time to install and implement AppChecker. This document describes general steps on getting started with AppChecker, from installation to execution to interpreting the results.

The Linux Application Checker (also referred to as "AppChecker") is a powerful new tool designed to help software developers target Linux. It draws on the extensive testing framework developed by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Linux Foundation and leverages the work of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup.

That's the official version, but what does the tool's functionality really mean to application developers who want to write apps for Linux? In a few words: ease of portability.